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August 6, 2005

Paul Graham on the deeper business lessons of open source

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Posted by Jim McGee

Doc Searls points to an excellent essay by Paul Graham on What Business Can Learn from Open Source.  It's full of thought-provoking observations. Here's just one sample:



The third big lesson we can learn from open source and blogging is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of flowing down from the top. Open source and blogging both work bottom-up: people make what they want, and the the best stuff prevails.

Does this sound familiar? It's the principle of a market economy. Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like communist states.

There are two forces that together steer design: ideas about what to do next, and the enforcement of quality. In the channel era, both flowed down from the top. For example, newspaper editors assigned stories to reporters, then edited what they wrote.

Open source and blogging show us things don't have to work that way. Ideas and even the enforcement of quality can flow bottom-up. And in both cases the results are not merely acceptable, but better. For example, open source software is more reliable precisely because it's open source; anyone can find mistakes.[ Paul Graham]

Well worth your time. I suspect that most large organizations will have an extraordinarily hard time grasping and acting on the trends Graham highlights. Those that do manage will have an edge in attracting talent.

Comments (1) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: Culture


COMMENTS

1. Mike Cane on August 9, 2005 5:42 PM writes...

>>>The third big lesson we can learn from open source and blogging is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of flowing down from the top. Open source and blogging both work bottom-up: people make what they want, and the the best stuff prevails.

>>>Does this sound familiar?

Well, DUH. The Internet is nothing but the biggest collection of BBSes ever imagined. And BBSes are from the early 1980s. No CORPORATE MIND could have devised what we have. Only ONE INDIVIDUAL MIND AT A TIME.

If you can't grasp *that* concept, get the hell out of the way. You're nothing but roadkill on our way to the future.

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